Tag Archives: moving

Chaos and Crunch Time!

Here we are, 9 days away from our move out date, and last night we got an email from our mover stating that they were CANCELLING our job.

We were meant to have a 4 man, 2 truck move that was booked through AnyVan in the UK, and the sub-contractor company cancelled because ONE of the men is in the hospital thus leaving us totally in the lurch!

When I asked why the other 3 men couldn’t continue on and do the job that we had booked, we were informed that they had never worked in Europe before, only the man in the hospital had. What??? Why did they even accept the quote???

We have given notice on our apartment and our garage, set the cut-off date for the utilities, and we HAVE to be out of here on the 30th of the month. So much for being organised and orderly when someone ELSE can throw your whole life into chaos by cancelling a scheduled international move.

Can’t wait to hear from AnyVan on Monday since (a) they have our pre-paid deposit and (b) their feedback form is RIGGED to never allow negative feedback! Yes, I will certainly keep all of my readers posted.

I’m typing this in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep. (sigh!) Wonder why…

Send us some happy-shiny thoughts because we certainly need them right now whilst we try to find another mover to step in with 9 days notice.

Life Changes, Life Planning, & Leaving France

Saying goodbye to France was something that we had not considered when we moved here last year, settled in, bought furniture and appliances, and began to make friends. But recent changes in the taxation structure since the election of Francois Hollande as President of France, the bureaucratic quagmire that all of us who move to France are forced to endure, pension issues, and several other boulders in the road that frequent readers of this site will already be acquainted with, have made this a place where we no longer wish to invest our emotional energy or our money. We are moving on after 10 months here in the South of France — with regret — but the decision has now been made and we are in the process of sorting out our last few weeks here in St. Girons.

And where are we going next? Well, to be truthful, we aren’t certain! We are flinging ourselves into the arms of the angels again, waiting to see where feels right, and then trusting that our choice is a good one. Our furniture and 100-plus boxes are being picked up in 2 and 1/2 weeks and taken to England to go back into storage. But then the fun begins as we go back on the road for awhile and we look for someplace to settle down. Living out of a suitcase wore us out after a year the last time and after spending almost 9 months in Normandy, we stopped moving in St. Girons. Who knows where we will be when we send for the household goods the next time!

A quiet moment between two women visitors at MACBA, the contemporary art & design museum in Barcelona, Spain.

The next few months should be very ‘interesting’ and we’ll need to be flexible. There is an unfolding book about life in France as an expat and I’ve even written the introduction chapter — but we’ll discuss that in another article.

Right now we are making lists of things to do, notifying the utility company, and packing-packing-packing. (again!)

Stay tuned as we find our feet on shifting sands!

That Glamourous Expat Lifestyle (cough-cough!)

Just letting you know that the day-to-day glamour-factor (smirk!) of our adventures in French expat lifestyle might be a bit muted this week. Ah well — it can’t always be a life of wine and cheese and glorious scenery, eh?

As previously reported, boxes 1-100 were delivered 3 weeks ago and we are still wading through those. The last 50-plus items are arriving today — tonight actually. Thank heavens it is summer and there is still enough light outside for Mark and the driver to see as they load things into the garage and tick off the numbers on the list. It will probably be well after 9 PM before they are done because the driver is running so late. And Mark hasn’t even had the splendid dinner that I planned to make yet.

I just — literally just — wrangled the apartment back into shape whilst Mark was off with some of the menfolk doing a two day mountain hiking session. He got back tonight just after 6 PM looking sunburnt, ready to drop, and walking quite gingerly because he was aching all over.

And this is the day that the driver was late??? Not really good timing.

Had planned to do some new posting this week with photo essays. At this point, I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

Now where did I put that print out of the packing list. (sigh!)

Boxes, HEAT, & A Bit Of This & That

A bit of personal and non-travel related commentary today. And no, I didn’t drop off the face of the planet and all is well in our world. But we’re still wading through the boxes that were delivered from Australia via ship to England and then delivery truck here to France.

When we were ‘back home’ in Australia on our 7 and 1/2 acre rural property, we had a studio space/storage area in a separate building from our cottage. And that studio space was bigger than this entire small apartment in France!

Let’s just say we are a little challenged space-wise right now. So a second culling of our possessions is under way. And the apartment is a &*^%$£! disaster zone as a result. We sold off 99.99% of our furniture, donated or sold hundreds of books and movies, pared down the clothes, and then stored the rest (including Mark’s rather massive collection of tools!) for 20 months. 21 months later, they have all arrived and in spite of what we thought was a serious purge back in Oz, we have too much stuff.

I have thinned out the books and music cds and movies (again!) and am donating them to a Cancer Support France group here in the South of France that helps English speaking expats who have relocated to France deal with cancer issues. It’s probably a god-send for them to have such a group since I can honestly tell you that if French is not your native language, being ill in a foreign country can occasionally be a very unsettling experience. So this felt like just the right place to send all of these lovely books and media items.

Our other ‘challenge’ for the last few weeks has been the intense heat and staggering humidity — and it isn’t just here. Huge swathes of France have been on alert due to the high temperatures that soared upward and then stayed there. The last time that this kind of heat arrived in France was in the 2003 heatwave when almost 15,000 people died in France alone. This a country where fans are the norm for coping with summer, air conditioning is a rarity, and along with the many other French businesses that close down for a month, a large number of medical practitioners go on holiday for the month of August.

We’ve also been making a concerted effort to drink huge amounts of water every day to avoid dehydration or heat-exhaustion. Just walking those few blocks to the Saturday market this past weekend (with a hat on and smeared in sun block) saw me returning home dripping wet and weak at the knees from the heat. I was weak and nauseous for the entire rest of the day along with some other rather unpleasant symptoms.

And did I mention that I have been living in a sarong for most of the last 2 weeks? Other than unpacking and sorting, this has not been the most productive period I’ve had since arriving in St. Girons and it is all down to the nauseating heat which has left me, and tens of thousands of other people, feeling quite incapacitated.

I still have the last 2 slideshows to post from 2 weekends ago when the Autrefois was in St. Girons, but for now there may not be any new photo ops until I feel that it’s safe to walk around outside for more than half an hour without feeling like I am going to collapse. Don’t I wish for (and remember fondly!) the body-resiliency of my 20s and 30s — a physical state that I unfortunately no longer have.

Ah well — until the next time — stay cool wherever you are!

Where Did Deborah Go This Time???

It’s never intentional — these unexpected life events that keep me away from the computer and away from writing and editing. But life in all of its upsy-downsy messiness has just breezed on through this past 4 weeks. I’m out on the other side now and hoping for some smooth but interesting weeks ahead.

The strange and scary bit was a week in the local French hospital. Too boring to get into — but I’ll be doing a lot of back and forth with specialists for the next few months. However, let me assure you that I’m not going ‘over to the other side’ anytime soon — trust me on that very firm statement!

Right in the middle of that bit of unexpected strangeness, we moved from our tiny-tiny-tiny village of Engomer into a proper Midi-Pyrenees town — St. Girons. And no, that was not without hiccups either.

The new 1-bedroom apartment that I found is in the old town section. Yes, there is traffic outside during the day, but it tapers off dramatically after 5:30 each evening. It’s a lovely old building of probably very late 1800’s to early 1900’s vintage. The windows are double-glazed and there are electric roll-down shutters in addition to the old-fashioned fold-back wooden shutters so I don’t feel like I am sitting out in the street listening to the passing motor scooters (lots of those!), cars, and buses. We also have a small balcony overlooking a long green garden (more on that in another post) with the mountains rising up behind and that side of the apartment is cool and quiet.

Here are two interior ‘before’ shots so you’ll be able to see the transformation in later posts. It’s a compact living-in-town apartment and it really is just what we have wanted for quite awhile! And by the way, no — I could not cope with this teeny-tiny kitchen ‘as is’ and it will be changing quite a bit.

Livingroom of the new apartment in St. Girons

Kitchen (the unimproved version!) in the new apartment in St. Girons

Whilst still in Engomer, 15 minutes outside of St. Girons, I was having a staying-in-bed day after being discharged from the hospital. Sitting there amidst a nest of pillows with my computer, via Skype I ordered the electricity to be put into our name and EDF did that quite efficiently with no snags once they ‘found’ us. It turns out that our building is known by two different numbers. Seriously, I had to laugh about it because this was like walking into an episode of the Twilight Zone as I heard the woman on the line explain that almost all of the buildings in town are still officially registered with their pre-World-War-II addresses, even if they are now another number altogether!!!

I encountered the same issue with France Telecom (aka Orange) as I was choosing the Unlimited Internet & Unlimited Telephone package. The woman on the line kept insisting that there was no such apartment number in our building and no one had had landline service in that building since 1993. What??? Then I told her the EDF pre-World-War-II building numbers story — and I heard her say, “Ah, there you are!” She then informed me that it would take 18 days before I would have a working phone line and internet and I could be the President of France or offer her a million euros and they couldn’t do it any faster.

After making an appointment 2 weeks earlier for the installation on this past Wednesday between 8 and 10 AM, I arrived at 7:50 AM. Then I waited and waited. No one ever arrived and it was clear that I’d been stood up by the installer. Grrrrr!!!

Back to Engomer, more packing, and when I called Orange to inquire about the missing installation man, some snooty idiot told me that it hadn’t been necessary because the phone was already on. No — it was not! I had picked up the brand new phone that was plugged into the apartment wall and listened for a dial tone repeatedly as I waited there all morning and it was most certainly not on.

After lunch, I loaded my car with boxes and bags, went back to the apartment, listened in vain for a dial tone, and finally sat waiting, waiting, waiting on my mobile phone (using up €13.50 in credit along the way!) for an Orange tech department person who again told me that the phone was already on. I retorted that I was sitting right there and no it was not, he said he would call the house line to prove it. Then he was quiet for a second or two before saying, “It would seem that you have a fault on the line. They will fix it from outside and you should have your phone on in 2 days. Au revoir, Madame Harmes.” And he hung up. Grrrrr!!!

The following morning, Thursday, was the appliance-delivery debacle (see below) and a mere few minutes before those men arrived, the installer from Orange (who should have been there the previous morning!) arrived at 8:15, picked up my phone, told me there was no signal (no kidding!), and he input some kind of code into my phone from his phone and the line was activated. Voila! A live and working phone.

This also gave me the ‘ability’ to set up my internet connection with a book full of all-in-French instructions for my Livebox. But without the internet already connected, I had no access to Google Translate to decipher words that I didn’t have stored in my limited-French-vocabulary brain. From somewhere in the past, I managed to dredge up memories of being walked-through that process by the online techs in Australia and I actually did it all correctly. Woo-hoo!

We had to buy appliances since the apartment came with none, so instead of taking the ‘cheap & cheerful’ (and potentially problematic!) option of buying used appliances, we decided to order a new front-loader washing machine and new refrigerator and cooker (stove with 3 gas top rings, 1 electric ring, and all electric self-cleaning oven). Easy, time-saving, and they’d just deliver it all to the door and bring them up the one flight of stairs so Mark wouldn’t have to do the lifting. Right?

That was the ‘in theory’ part of the story. I ordered all of the appliances from the same company up the road in the very large and metropolitan city of Toulouse. The washing machine arrived in 2 days. Hooray! But the refrigerator and cooker didn’t arrive for another 8 days. They are supposed to call an hour ahead of time to let you know when they were arriving , but they just arrived at 8:30 AM with no advance phone call.

Something had urged me to spend the night in the apartment on that previous night. I raced down the spiral of our stairwell, opened the large front door, then listened to the sound of two sturdy young men hefting those appliances up the stairs. When they wrestled the large boxes into place, I asked them to unpack each appliance so I could inspect them for damage prior to signing that I accepted them. Cardboard and styrofoam went flying all through the room and there were the pristine new appliances. I was ever so glad that I had asked for the unpacking when I spied a large caved-in left side on the cooker — and then one of the young men pointed to a matching caved in side on the right. Forms had to be filled in and I had to write REFUSED on the form, sign it, and they had to carry that heavy appliance back down the stairs. (sigh!)

Day after day the apartment has been filling up with furniture and we now have comfy lounge chairs, a coffee table and end table, a tv console with a flat-screen television and new dvd player, and some bookshelves, a bed, and wardrobes. Lots of pictures will follow in the days ahead as we assemble, arrange, and decorate! But we’ve been sleeping and eating here for 3 days now and we’re temporarily cooking on a camping stove with a tiny gas bottle. Ah well — living in flow.

Gads — I didn’t mean for this post to be quite so long!

Gotta run — boxes and bags to unpack. More soon — really and truly.

Moving Overseas Means Even MORE Paperwork!

Just when I thought I had completed the last of the paperwork, just when I thought I had no more PDF documents or blank forms to fill out, along comes the insurance forms this morning. I have had to print out our 16 page inventory and I have to place a value on EVERY single thing that I want to insure! And we have somewhere between 750-850 books in those cartons, and I have to give a specific count.

Creating an insurance inventory and assigning a value for EVERY item we own!

Not only that, I have to list how MANY pair of trousers Mark has, how many dresses and shoes and cardigans I have, how many dishes and pots and pans — well, you get the drift. And if I fail to list them, then they aren’t insured!

In another period of my life when I was in my 20s, I was a military wife and I learned how to pack according to military standards. That meant that every box had to be numbered and every single item in every box had to be listed on the master inventory forms. In this post 9-11 world, that has proven to be handy as we moved around the world a few times and our goods sailed through Customs quite easily because I had such a detailed list. The customs agents in Australia had a friendly laugh at just how many books there were in our household goods.

But I have to say that this is the most detailed inventory I have ever had to fill out for an insurance policy. And I have to determine what is the value for each item if I had to purchase them again on this side of the world.

If you don’t hear from me for several days, you’ll know why!

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey